As I wrote last time, there are three basic truths that apply here, if you want to actually do something, and not just vent.

Not that venting is wrong necessarily, but it will only get your frustrations out, and we want to win.

Not win in the way that Trump means it, but actually triumph. If that is what you want to do, then listen up:

Like anything else worth doing - such as winning an NBA championship, winning a Grand Slam in tennis, or ending up defeating your rivals in debate, or any other arena, at any level, you have to make sacrifices and you have to want to win more than your rivals. Hasn't this always been true - that those things worth doing, require sacrifices and tremendous effort? What is easy and requires little to no risk is correspondingly not worth much.

You won't hear any of this from Congress, or mainstream media, or right-wing media, still less the White House: the insurance companies (HMOs) don't do anything except act as middle-men and are not needed. They only siphon off profits for themselves, like giant ticks. Health care should cost, and would cost, far less and for everyone, sick or healthy. Obamacare (the ACA) was originally a Heritage Foundation idea that Gov. Mitt Romney adopted for Massachusetts and then in order to become a "viable" (read: expensive) presidential candidates, Obama and Hillary made a pact with the HMOs not to offer a single-payer or a government option.

The Republicans are in a fix because they have been promising a better plan than Obamacare for years, but they can't deliver on their twin goals: enriching their friends in the insurance industry further but keeping enough healthy people in to make any insurance plan cost-effective. They just can't do it. The point I started from bears repeating: what we hear and what we don't hear from authorities is key to their decrepit system surviving. It is a form of governance and a mode of exercising power. It is nothing less. And the only way to break through that is for enough people making what isn't doscussed by authorities part of the whole discourse. You always start a social movement with small numbers and you have to be willing to start with those smaller forces with an aim in your strategy to grow larger. It is hard, but the only realistic alternative.

There are, of course, many different dimensions to the question of how best to deal with this Trump-Pence regime. On the one hand, it can quickly become a very complicated issue, as anyone alive and at least semi-aware knows. On the other hand, there are certain simple truths that you have to get right or you will immediately, or soon thereafter, go astray.

Let's begin with the simple truths and then move from there.

The first simple fact: more of the same or similar won't do. We got here through those means and if this result is unacceptable to you, then you have to take a different path. As Sherlock Holmes said in The Sign of the Four story: "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"

We are dealing with a system and therefore our aim is to change the governing system logic with a different system. While Trump is hardly normal, in fact, highly abnormal, even his closest associates are running in circles trying to please their mercurial and agitated boss, and Trump though he doesn't like it, needs other people to do anything. As peculiar and out-from-right-field as Trump is, the issue is not mainly him. The problem we face is not "human nature" as people usually mistakenly mean that - greedy, selfish, narrow-minded - but the logic of capital and the pursuit of more capital. Even Trump obeys that law. As would anyone else, including Bernie Sanders. The existing system isn't going to offer you within its existing legal channels the means to undo that very system. It would be crazy to do that and there is a reason why no system ever has done so. If you think that voting for a new system is on the ballot, then you have another think coming. You have to go outside the normal channels. That is what the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement and the women's movement all learned and showed. That is what history can teach us, if you pay attention to that cumulative and world-historic experience, which leads us to the second simple truth.

Elaine Brower of World Can't Wait speaking at the NYC Stop the War on Iran rally 2/4/12

Welcome!

This site aims to accomplish two related goals. First, it complements Dennis Loo's book Globalization and the Demolition of Society so that people reading the book can get more deeply into it. (See navigation bar above, labeled "GDS Book Annotations"). We believe that his book is a landmark, providing a solid foundation for politics of a new path. Taking such a path is critical to humanity and the planet's future. As his book's dust jacket states:

[F]ree market fundamentalism - also known as neoliberalism - makes us not more secure or prosperous: it tears the social fabric and undermines security, leading inevitably to disasters on the individual, regional, and global levels.

Neoliberalism is based on the mantra that market forces should run everything. It aims to eliminate job and income security, the social safety net (including welfare and other social guarantees), unions, pensions, public services, and the governmental regulation of corporations. It consequently undermines the basis for people to voluntarily cooperate with authority as almost everyone is increasingly left by themselves to face gargantuan private interests, with governmental and corporate authority ever more indifferent to the public’s welfare.

Those in charge of our collective fates in government and business personify a heartless system based on profit and plunder. They have been relentlessly instituting profoundly immoral and unjust policies even while they insist that they are doing the opposite. We, on the other hand, stand for and are fighting for a radically different system and set of values than this.

Second, in order to get at the truth and because the ways in which humanity's historic striving for understanding and its capacity to wonder and imagine are very rich and diverse, we seek to reflect that richness and diversity on our site. See "About Us" on navigation bar. We intend to be engaging and compelling, as the best investigative journalism and art are, and relentlessly scientific, rigorous, and direct, as those who cherish the truth are. We believe that we can be both accessible and sophisticated. As Loo lays out in his book,

Defeating the empire is not something that occurs only on the literal battlefield. It is also something that is determined throughout the continuum of battles over many issues, including: ideas; philosophy; forms of organization and leadership in economy, politics, and other realms; ways of arguing; ways of responding to and respecting empirical data; interest in truth as opposed to expedience; how people and the environment should be treated; the nature of relations among people (e.g., between women and men, different races and ethnicities, rich and poor countries, etc.); ways of responding to criticism and ideas that are not your own; ways of handling one’s own errors and those of others; and more, all the way up through how warfare is carried out. The contrast between the methods and goals of the neoliberals and those of us who seek an entirely different world is stark. (Globalization and the Demolition of Society, Pp. 326-7)

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